GeoRabble Perth made a long-awaited return on the 28^th November at our favourite haunt, the Universal Bar.

MC Nic Flett @mapguy83 served-up some spatial tapas with a full line-up of six speakers on everything from mapping ants to a Silicon Valley experience.

Chris Roach kicked-off by exploring what a geospatial team does in their spare time. The answer? More work! With the assistance of the actual internet (in a black box on the table), Chris took the plunge by sharing a live-demo of his handy-work mapping habitat threats for endangered marsupials. Respect for that bravery – you set the bar high!

From possums to ants, Ross Lewin shared some experience in using artificial intelligence to find Fire Ant nests. Better AI finds them before you step on them. Some pretty brutal images of what happens when you do. It turns-out that ants outweigh humans on the planet; however, that doesn’t make giant ant nests easy to distinguish from other objects in an image.

Ikrom Nishanbaev took a deep dive on exploring Australian cultural heritage sites with the Geospatial Semantic Web – giving us a master class in the code and tools behind making that look easy. That’s quite a task as it takes some real skill to make something so complex look simple.

The heritage theme continued with Damien Hassan -on finding Perth’s first BBQ. His team have been busy working on an exciting project that will soon make some incredible maps of lost Perth available to the public for the first time. There’s an amazing amount of detail in these maps – enough to be able to track down what maybe WA’s first BBQ, amongst hundreds of other gems (like subterranean loos). Stay tuned!

Kurt Adams took us on another journey through Perth over time, with a very impressive set of maps about property. Kurt covered everything from location, price and block-size, to access to transport and sewerage – with a map in an appropriate shade of brown. Did someone say Vindaloo?

And finally, Sophie Richards shared a few stories from an adventure this year at Stanford University through the Silicon Valley Innovation Academy – an amazing opportunity to learn about data science from the brightest in Silicon Valley. It’s not rocket science, but there are some clever math tricks behind the biggest brands … RabbleRabble.

Thanks again to our generous sponsors for the event – Hexagon Geospatial. Stoked to have you involved.

If you would like to help grow our Geocommunity, with brain expanding ideas or sustenance at upcoming events, please share with us at perth@georabble.org. We can’t hold these events without you!

Finally, we can’t bear the thought of wrapping-up 2018 just yet – so here’s a shout-out to the WA Geo-geek community for some Christmas drinks together on Wednesday 12^th December at 5pm at The Globe 495/497 Wellington Street. Hope to see you there!

Stay tuned via #georabbleper for news about our first event for 2019.